SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
SpaceX Won "rural" FCC Funding in Surprising Places, Like Major Airports
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is "subsidiz[ing] broadband for the rich," according to the title of an analysis last week by Derek Turner, research director at advocacy group Free Press. Turner has a strong track record analyzing FCC broadband data and last year found major errors in Pai's broadband-deployment claims.
[...] SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said Starlink is targeted at rural areas and "will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble" reaching. While SpaceX did get FCC funding for plenty of rural areas, it also won "the right to serve a large number of very urban areas that the FCC's broken system deemed eligible for awards," Turner wrote. For example, Turner wrote that SpaceX won broadband subsidies in locations at or adjacent to major airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New York City, Seattle, Las Vegas, Newark, Miami, Boston, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, Detroit, and Philadelphia.
[...] The RDOF[*] and other universal service programs run by the FCC are paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills. According to rules set by the FCC, the entire $9.2 billion must fund deployment only in census blocks where no ISPs report offering service with at least 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds.
But census blocks are small, and blocks that are counted as unserved "may be surrounded on all sides by fiber," Turner told Ars via email. "That's because of an important design flaw in the FCC's mapping system: ISPs are [required] to report the blocks where they currently offer service or could without extraordinary use of resources within a 10-day period. Thus a block can show up as 'unserved' even though it isn't any more expensive than any typical block to serve; it just means an ISP didn't claim the block."
SpaceX "appears to have played by the rules. But the FCC's rules created a broken system," Turner wrote in his post on the Free Press site. "By bidding for subsidies assigned to dense urban areas, Musk's firm and others were able to get potentially hundreds of millions in subsidies meant for people and businesses in rural areas that would never see broadband deployment without the government's help."
RDOF - Rural Digital Opportunity Fund
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2020, @05:23AM (1 child)
It is all about the Rurals! They are so stupid and uneducated, because of no internet access. It was the same back in the '50s, when they opposed integration. And in the '60's, when they opposed integretion. And in the '70s, when they still opposed integration. And the '80s, the '90's, the '00s, and finally, Trump, where they thought they could oppose integration again, but already the South had become too stupid to have a consistent policy position, even a racist one. So, they elected a New York City shyster real estate developer, as the next best thing. Stupid, really, really, stupid.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday December 17 2020, @03:35PM
You've got some valid points, but you not only misunderstand them, you express them in a way that makes them difficult to understand. And stupid isn't the same as ignorant, even if that were the correct attribution.
What's going on is that people are comfortable with ideas that they're used to. The internet has enabled silos of opinion, so that lots of people aren't exposed to differing ideas, and since they are able to avoid ideas that make them uncomfortable, they do so. And those who live where a particular idea is really dominant are inevitably exposed to the local ideas. These aren't things that are being rationally decided on ANY side, but cities ensure a mix of ideas is presented, so those who live or work in cities are exposed to multiple ideas, and are therefore (on the average) less upset by them.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.